There is something fascinating about them isn't there?
One of the recent additions to Alton Towers is a mini Sea Life Centre and they have quite a large pool with small sharks and rays in it Mab took this picture of one of the little chaps.
He's a smoothhound and he could grow up to be a five footer, but these little chaps seemed very friendly though, sticking their heads out of the water to get a closer look at us, one of them even wriggled up so far his pectoral fins were above the surface. I have heard that the Sea Life Centres are encouraging staff to tickle the wee beasties so perhaps he was soliciting a tickle. Mind you there was a notice saying don't touch the fish which didn't stop some of the idiots grabbing for their dorsal fins. I seemed to attract a lot of interest from a couple of dogfish and thornback rays as well and as the dogfish rose and showed me an extremely pointy set of pearly whites I thought I'd keep my fingers to myself.
I spent ages looking at these chaps while Old Nick and the Powder Monkey had their fingers cleaned by some shrimps in the pool next door.
My next favourite place was the Shark Tunnel
Here is a white tipped reef shark, there were a couple of those plus a bonnethead which is a kind of hammerhead, only it was camera shy and a couple of zebra sharks. There were also some rays I'm not sure what kind.
The only thing that marred my fishy enjoyment was the stupid Ghost of the Sea AV presentation that just kept running all the time, I mean come on these fish are so brilliant you don't need some cod pirate chanting something like this
The Ghost of the Sea
The Ghost of the Sea
drank too much rum
so he needed a wee
